The Legend of the Condor Heroes Chapter 12 – Part 3

Guo Jing and Huang Rong both started violently and stepped back several paces. But though they were startled together, one of them was startled for real and the other was pretending.

Huang Rong said, “Ah, Qigong, how did you fly up into the tree? It’s the Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing,¹ that’s it exactly. How could I forget? Father often mentions it. He says the martial art he admires most in all his life is the Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing.”

Hong Qigong was delighted. “So your father can still tell the truth. I thought that once Wang Chongyang was dead he’d count himself first under heaven!” He turned to Guo Jing. “Your foundation is no worse than this girl’s. Where you lose is in technique. Girl, go back to the inn.” Huang Rong knew he was going to teach Guo Jing his palm technique, and she went off happily.

Hong Qigong turned to Guo Jing, his face grave. “Kneel down and swear an oath. Without my permission you will never pass on what I teach you to anyone else, and that includes that imp of a little wife of yours.”

Guo Jing was in a quandary. He thought, If Rong-er asks me to teach her, how can I refuse? “Qigong,” he said, “I’d better not learn it. She can just be better than me.”

Hong Qigong asked in surprise, “Why?”

Guo Jing said, “If she asks me to teach her and I refuse, I would be letting her down. But if I teach her, I would be letting you down.”

Hong Qigong chuckled. “The silly boy’s heart is in the right place. When he says one he means one, and when he says two he means two. Very well, I’ll teach you one move, Proud Dragon Repents.² That Huang Yaoshi thinks the world of himself. Even if he envies it secretly, he’d never sink so low as to come and steal the skills I keep for myself. Besides, his martial arts go a completely different way from mine. I can’t learn his, and he can’t learn my palm technique.” As he spoke he bent his left leg a little, curved his right arm inwards and traced a circle with his right palm, then with a whoosh pushed it outwards. His palm swept into a pine tree in front of him, there was a crack, and the pine snapped clean through.

Guo Jing was astonished. He would never have imagined that one push could carry such fierce, tremendous power.

Hong Qigong said, “That tree is dead. A living man would give way and dodge, of course. The hard part of this move is to leave your opponent nowhere to retreat and no room to give way. Out goes your move, crack, and your enemy is done for, just like that pine.” He went through the posture twice, then explained in detail how to project inner force outwards, how to launch the move and recover from it, and how to circulate one’s neili³ and deliver power. The key was that after the force had been sent out, it must be pulled back. The difficulty lay not in the release but in the recovery.

Guo Jing was slow-witted by nature, but his neigong⁴ already had a foundation, and a martial art so simple in form and so profound in power suited him perfectly. He set his mind to it at once, and after a little over two shichen⁵ he had the essentials.

Hong Qigong said, “That girl’s palm technique has several times more feints than real strikes. If you go spinning round after her, you’re bound to fall for her tricks, and however fast you are, you’ll never be faster than she is. You think that after so many feints this palm must be real, and it’s false all the same. The next one looks sure to be false, and she catches you out with a real one.” Guo Jing nodded again and again. Hong Qigong went on, “So the only way to break that palm technique of hers is to pay no attention at all to which is real and which is false. When her palm comes, real or false, you just give her one Proud Dragon Repents. When she sees how formidable it is, she’ll have to pull her palm back to block, and that breaks it.”

Guo Jing asked, “And then what?”

Hong Qigong’s face darkened. “And then what? Silly boy, how much skill do you think she has, to hold off this move I’m teaching you?”

Guo Jing was very worried. “If she can’t hold it off, won’t I hurt her?”

Hong Qigong shook his head and sighed. “If my palm force could only go out and never come back, if I couldn’t make it heavy or light, hard or soft, just as I pleased, how could it be called the Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing, the palm technique without equal under heaven?”

Guo Jing murmured his assent, but he had made up his mind. He thought, Until I’ve learned to send it out and pull it back at will, I’ll never try it on Rong-er.

Hong Qigong said, “You don’t believe me? Try it, then!”

Guo Jing took up his stance, picked out an especially slender pine, copied Hong Qigong’s posture, aimed at the trunk and, with a whoosh, struck. The pine swayed a few times but did not break.

Hong Qigong swore at him. “Silly boy, what are you shaking the pine for? Catching squirrels? Gathering pine cones?”

Guo Jing turned red to the ears and gave a sheepish laugh.

Hong Qigong said, “I told you, leave your opponent nowhere to retreat and no room to give way. That palm of yours had force enough, but as soon as the pine swayed, your strength was dissolved. First learn to strike the pine without moving it. Then you’ll be able to break a tree with one palm.”

Light dawned on Guo Jing. “Then the force has to land astonishingly fast,” he said happily, “so the other man has no time to resist.”

Hong Qigong rolled his eyes. “What else? Need you even ask? You’ve been sweating away all this time, and only now has this simple idea dawned on you. You really are as thick as they come.” He went on, “This move is called Proud Dragon Repents, and the heart of the technique lies not in the word kang, ‘proud’, but in the word hui, ‘repents’. If all you wanted was hardness and speed, fury and ferocity, anyone with a few hundred jin⁶ of brute strength could use it. How could a move like that win Huang Yaoshi’s admiration? ‘The proud dragon has cause to repent. What is full cannot last.’⁷ So whatever goes out must come back. Send out ten parts of force, and keep twenty parts in yourself. The day you get the taste of this ‘repents’, you’ll have learned three tenths of the move. It’s like a fine old wine, not fiery on the tongue but with an aftertaste wonderfully mellow and deep, and that comes from the ‘repents’. With everything under heaven, once it reaches its very peak, decline follows. My Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing are rooted in the principles of the Book of Changes, and the Book of Changes holds that ‘when Tai reaches its end, Pi comes, and when Pi reaches its end, Tai comes.’⁸ The principle of Proud Dragon Repents is to leave yourself room to retreat before you reach the top. That is a martial art that wins and never loses. A martial art that wins and never loses, that’s formidable enough, isn’t it? And even if you really were going to lose, it wouldn’t matter. The force we’ve held back is still deep and plentiful.”

Seeing from Guo Jing’s face that he only half understood, Hong Qigong said, “The principle of the Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing runs very deep. When my shifu was teaching me, I thought the harder the palm the better, and I put every ounce of force I had into it. My shifu boxed my ears soundly several times and said, ‘The essence of this palm technique is the very opposite of a bull charging a wall. Send out a move with several thousand jin of force, ten thousand even, and sooner or later it will be spent. If your enemy is a master, he’ll strike back the very instant your force runs out. Your ten thousand jin are gone, and you haven’t a few liang or qian left. He need only use three jin of strength to topple your ten thousand.’ This move, Proud Dragon Repents, is the root of the Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing. Once you understand it, the other seventeen aren’t hard. ‘Proud’ means as mighty, as splendid, as high and as strong as can be. A divine dragon flies up very high, baring its fangs and brandishing its claws, as fearsome as can be, but at that very moment its power has reached its peak, and from then on it can only fall back, never advance. This ‘repents’ means knowing that after hardness and strength there must come weakness. A great ship running before the wind with the current under her, all sail set and flying along, can very easily strike a rock and capsize. In how you live and how you act, you should always leave yourself some leeway. I can see you’re loyal and honest and willing to think of others, and that’s why I’m teaching you this move. This palm isn’t for bullying people with your strength. It’s for keeping yourself whole and alive.”

Guo Jing was overjoyed to hear it, and he beamed from ear to ear. “As long as nobody beats me to death, that’s good enough. I don’t want to beat anybody to death!”

Hong Qigong nodded and patted him on the shoulder. “Good lad. You don’t want to crush people, you don’t want to kill your opponent. If that’s how you truly feel at heart, you’re just the stuff for my kind of martial arts. Being a bit slow doesn’t matter. What matters is a good heart, that’s the main thing. It’s your nature not to want to kill, so when you strike you naturally hold some strength back, and that’s the secret of ‘repents’. Our Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing work on the rule ‘the stronger the enemy, the stronger I am’, which is why they’re called Dragon-Subduing. You could just as well call them Tiger-Taming. The hardest part is to strike with great force and still keep strength in reserve. But if all you do is hold back, and no force goes out at all, that won’t do either.”

Having said all this, Hong Qigong reflected that although his shifu had explained these deep principles to him long ago, it had taken him many years to understand them truly. Guo Jing did not look clever. He seemed a muddle-headed lad who knew little of the world, and no young fellow could possibly grasp so great a truth straight away. So he said, “The principle of this palm technique holds just the same for how you live and act. If you don’t understand it now, never mind. I’ll teach you a few passages to read. Learn them by heart first, and later you can turn them over slowly.

“The first passage is, ‘He goes ahead of Heaven and Heaven does not oppose him, he follows after Heaven and keeps to Heaven’s seasons.’ Heaven means the natural order. ‘Ahead of Heaven’ means seeing the flaw in your opponent’s moves before it has even shown itself. This move, Proud Dragon Repents, has to read the enemy before he acts and strike at the flaw he is about to reveal. If he has already shown a flaw, don’t let the chance slip. Hit his weak point all the harder. Our martial principles are not the Daoists’. The Daoist Laozi says, ‘Among soldiers there is a saying, I dare not play the host but play the guest, I dare not advance an inch but fall back a foot.’ It holds that you must never be the first to attack, only ever retreat and defend, and overcome the hard with the soft. We are hard when we should be hard and soft when we should be soft.

“The second passage is, ‘Proud means knowing how to advance but not how to retreat, knowing how to survive but not how to perish, knowing how to gain but not how to lose. Only the sage, surely? To know advance and retreat, survival and perishing, and never stray from what is right, only the sage, surely?’”

He read it out slowly, line by line, had Guo Jing read it after him until he knew it by heart, then explained, “When you strike, think of advancing, but think even more of retreating. Know that you can live, and know too that you can die. Know that the move can win, and know too that it can lose. Winning is fine, of course, but if you can’t win, never mind, and if you lose, never mind either. At least you’ll never end up pinned to the ground and beaten black and blue, yelling, ‘Mercy, mercy!’”

Guo Jing laughed aloud.

Guo Jing fixed his words firmly in his memory, to ponder slowly in days to come. His way of learning martial arts had always been “When others practise for a morning, I practise for ten days.” He threw himself into the palm technique, putting his mind to two things, pulling back his force and holding strength in reserve. For the first few dozen palms the pine always shook, but as he used more and more force, the trunk shook less and less. He knew he was making progress and was very pleased. By now the edges of his hands were badly red and swollen, but he kept at his gruelling practice without letting up.

Hong Qigong watched for a while, then grew bored, lay down on the ground and was soon snoring.

As Guo Jing practised on, mind and spirit came together, and he began to launch his force and recover it with growing ease. He drew a breath into his dantian,⁹ struck out hard and at once pulled his force back, and felt that the strength within him was far from spent. The pine did not so much as quiver. Guo Jing was overjoyed. He struck a second palm in the same way, but this time he held the force in the edge of his hand and did not let it go. There came several sharp cracks, and the little pine snapped and bent over.

Then Huang Rong’s voice came from a distance, crying, “Well done!” She was strolling towards them with a food box in her hand.

Hong Qigong’s eyes were not yet open, but he had already smelt the food. “Smells good, smells good!” he cried. He leapt up, snatched the food box and lifted the lid. Inside were a bowl of smoked frogs’ legs, a fat Eight-Treasure duck and a heap of snow-white silver silk rolls. Hong Qigong gave a great whoop of delight. His hands flew, left up and right down, right up and left down, grabbing food and feeding it into his mouth in a steady stream. He chewed and praised it by turns, but with his lips, teeth, tongue and throat all full of food, there was no making out a word he said. By the time not a shred of skin or meat was left on the frogs’ legs or the Eight-Treasure duck, he remembered that Guo Jing had not eaten yet. Feeling rather sheepish, he called, “Come, come, come. The silver silk rolls taste pretty good.” Really too embarrassed, he added, “Better than the duck, even.”

Huang Rong giggled. “Qigong, you haven’t tasted my best dishes yet.”

Hong Qigong was startled and delighted. “What are they? What are they?”

Huang Rong said, “I couldn’t name them all just like that. Stir-fried cabbage, say, or steamed bean curd, stewed eggs, braised radish, plain boiled pork.”

Hong Qigong had a palate as refined as any in the world, and he knew well that a truly great cook shows the most marvellous skill in the most ordinary dishes. It was the same in martial arts: to bring forth wonders from the plain and ordinary was the mark of a grand master. When he heard her, he was startled and delighted all over again, and his whole face became a picture of fawning entreaty. “Good, good! Didn’t I always say you were a good girl? I’ll go and buy you cabbage and bean curd, shall I?”

Huang Rong laughed. “No need for that. What you bought wouldn’t be what I want.”

Hong Qigong laughed. “Right, right. How could anything someone else bought be any use?”

Footnotes

1. 降龙十八掌 — Xiánglóng Shíbā Zhǎng. Literally eighteen dragon-subduing palms. Hong Qigong’s palm technique. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

2. 亢龙有悔 — Kàng Lóng Yǒu Huǐ. Literally the proud dragon has cause to repent. A move of the Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing, named from a line of the Book of Changes. ↩

3. 内力 — nèilì. Literally internal force. The kinetic manifestation of cultivated qi. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

4. 内功 — nèigōng. Literally internal cultivation. The practice of developing neili through breathing and meditation. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

5. 时辰 — shíchén. Traditional Chinese unit of time equal to two hours; the day was divided into twelve shichen. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

6. 斤 — jīn. A unit of weight, about 590 grams in the Song dynasty. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

7. 易经 — Yìjīng. The Book of Changes, one of the Five Classics, a divination manual that became a philosophical text on the patterns of change. The line on the arrogant dragon comes from its first hexagram, Qian. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩

8. 泰极否来，否极泰来 — Tài jí pǐ lái, pǐ jí tài lái. Literally when Tai reaches its extreme Pi comes, and when Pi reaches its extreme Tai returns. Tai and Pi are the hexagrams of peace and of stagnation in the Book of Changes, and the saying expresses the turning of fortune. ↩

9. 丹田 — dāntián. Literally cinnabar field. The primary energy centre below the navel in internal cultivation. See Wuxia Wiki. ↩